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(01/29/15 9:01pm)
Apparently New York City, my hometown, is “over” in the way 12-year-old girls signified the end of Uggs and leggings. First off, I reject this premise entirely. New York City is a complex organism that exists in various permutations for its multitude of residents and visitors. The observation, or rather pronouncement, is grounded in some reality. A significant part of New York is only available to masters of the universe. Every new plot of land that has a warehouse with any potential at all is consumed within minutes by developers and weeks later becomes a concert venue or luxury apartment. I have heard arguments that beyond its outlandish real estate prices, the city is too polished and too safe — the proverbial grit is gone. I grant you that New York has changed dramatically, and we’re not just mourning the dive bars and hole-in-the-wall eateries.
(11/14/14 12:40am)
Last spring sitting in the Radcliffe Camera in Oxford and working on my final dissertation, I was writing somewhat frantically to my contact at Oxford Aid to the Balkans (OXAB). I desperately wanted to switch my placement in Bulgaria from an orphanage on the Black Sea to a small, dusty town a few hours south of Sofia called Pazardzhik to work with a group of Syrian refugee children. When I finally got confirmation that I would be heading to the veritable boonies of Bulgaria to teach these kids with another student from Oxford, I think the Rad Cam heard its first squeal in at least the past 150 years. A month later, I found myself on a plane to Sofia, trying to decipher the words that suddenly surrounded me. Even when I learned the Cyrillic alphabet, the world that I now inhabited remained obscure. Then again, it has never been particularly clear for the children we were to be working with. They and their parents have remained in a bureaucratic limbo, filled to the brim with political agendas and centuries-old prejudices. Even worse may be that no one actually knows of their struggle. While the Syrian refugees that remain in Iraq, Turkey and Lebanon have received widespread news coverage (not that this has benefitted them to any great extent), those who have made it out of the Middle East and into the European Union are virtually invisible. Fair enough, one might think, considering the disparity in wealth between the two locales... until you look at Bulgaria.
(03/01/14 9:52pm)
The political undertones of the Olympic games occupy a spectrum, taking center stage in some years and a back seat in others. Famous examples of the former were 1936, when Nazi Germany used the event as a stage for their propaganda, or 1972, when Black September took 11 Israeli athletes hostage, resulting in all of their deaths. The Olympics cannot be expected to be a two week pause in international hostilities, where the olive wreath bestowed on the victors from ancient times is fully realized in all of its symbolism. Every two years, the course of current events is interrupted as a city, perhaps unknown before they were selected by the committee to host the games, scrambles to wash the dishes and make up the guest bedrooms before the world arrives. But in a flash, they are over, and the world picks up where it had left off with no competition to distract from the turmoil that was momentarily quieted.
(01/30/14 10:54pm)
In the wake of a benign but humbling online quiz attempting to ascertain if stereotypical behaviors could pinpoint your political allegiances, in which I scored 76 percent conservative, I’ve been taking some time to reevaluate my belief system. I jest, but in all seriousness, living abroad this year while studying at Oxford and traveling around central and Eastern Europe during my holiday has given me time to test run ideologies. Each new place I awoke to resembled a parodied version of Odysseus’ arrival in a sequence of strange lands. “Odysseus woke, sat up, and thought: ‘Oh what mortal place have I reached this time? Are they cruel and merciless savages, or god-fearing people, generous to strangers? Am I near creatures with human speech? Let me look, and see.’” Again, I jest. Odysseus was nothing if not a walking hyperbole of man, but his trepidation at setting out without Google maps or his Zagat’s Guide rings true in the mind of every traveler: star struck with the locale but a bit shaky on the gory logistics. But novelty in the course of one’s travels does lie on a spectrum, and for the purposes of this article I speak primarily of the normalcy of legalized prostitution in many European countries.
(09/20/13 9:06pm)
In American discourse, diplomacy has somehow been cast aside as a choice for political eunuchs. The warmongers who’ve gained a stronghold in our government and media demand brash military action. Their approach targets our reptilian brain, attuned to a Biblical sense of justice or retribution. Having taken the onerous role of moral arbiters on the global stage, our response to breaches of international law or American standards has consistently been violent, climaxing with the Iraq and Afghanistan wars that enveloped the past decade and claimed the lives of well over 100,000 Iraqi and Afghani civilians. The 20th century was marked by extreme overreaction in the face of fear – legitimate or contrived – from Korea to Vietnam.
(03/28/13 7:03pm)
In February of 2010, Julian Assange and WikiLeaks made history by releasing the largest set of restricted government documents to the public, leaking over 250,000 private U.S. diplomatic cables and 500,000 classified reports concerning covert military operations.
(02/28/13 5:39pm)
In Brave New World, Aldous Huxley writes, “From eighteen hundred bottles eighteen hundred carefully labelled infants were simultaneously sucking down their pint of pasteurized external secretion.” Hyperbole, sure, but also a prediction of the major flaw of the 20th and 21st centuries: mass production.
(02/07/13 5:42pm)
This year, senior Eleanor Gardner, a political science and philosophy major from Bermuda, received the Rhodes Scholarship.